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Free email marketing is a branch of a larger type of marketing called bulk email marketing. In theory, this is quite a good way to market online because the costs of production are low, the reach is nearly 100%, and you can target just the people that you want. However, there is one small problem with this delivery mechanism, which is that spamming is also a branch of bulk email marketing. This goes back to the early days of the internet before legislation and the wide use of the email. Bulk email marketers took the opportunity to exploit this medium with online sales, which in itself was fine, except for the fact that most marketers indulged in sending unsolicited mails. This brought in the advent of spam filters and, with the increasing amount of spam and mail users, came the need for more complex anti-spam mechanisms.
Cut to the present day, the spam world might finally be looking at extinction in a few years with the daily dose of spam reducing from hundreds per day per mailbox, to below fifty now. This is all because of the work put into making spam filters more aggressive to the point that spam no longer figures in a mail user's daily work. However, regular email marketers are a casualty in the process. So how do you make free email marketing work for you?
The first trick is to learn how spam filters work and then tweak your content in such a way that it doesn't trigger off a spam alarm. The most important thing to remember from a deliver perspective is that you must not over-mail a certain domain as some of them have daily limits on the number of mails sent to it in a day. Anymore and it could be a spam attack. Apart from this, understand that spam filters work on keywords and phrases. Most marketing material is rather predictable to the human eye and even more so to software that uses complex mathematics to understand what constitutes spam. Therefore, you must not use keywords more than two times in the entire mail and stay away from the usual sales spiel.
The second important item in your free email marketing campaign is to not use subject lines that are obviously spam-worthy. Most humans can again recognize spam from subject lines and again so can software. Do not use sales spiel again over here and instead try to be more informative in your approach about the contents of the mail.
The final and most important tip in your free email marketing campaign is to get client opt-ins for your mailing efforts. Do not fall for the temptation to buy mail address databases from a spammer. This is because mail ID's that don't exist in a person's address book or folders are the first to be checked for spam material. This is also a fundamental tenet of the US Government's CAN-SPAM legislation and one that all US based online marketers have to follow.